The rapid growth in accessibility and use of the Internet has drawn an increasing number of businesses into using the Internet as a vehicle to attract potential customers. In many cases, businesses are relying on the Internet as their sole or primary marketing and advertising conduit. It is now commonplace for online and “brick-and-mortar” businesses to contract with search engines in an effort to direct search engine users to the businesses. Such relationships generally revolve around the use of keywords (or key phrases), the rights to which are purchased from search engines by businesses, in response to which the search engines conspicuously display advertising associated with the businesses when a user inputs the particular purchased keywords. For example, a shoe company may purchase the keyword “sandal” from a search engine, so that when a user inputs “sandal” in the search engine, the search engine prominently displays a link to the shoe company or advertising associated therewith.
The pricing of keywords can vary depending on any one or more of a number of factors including, but not limited to, the demand for a particular keyword (the more sought a keyword is, the higher its value), the number of searches including particular keywords, time of usage for keywords, and ad position. Further, the cost of a particular keyword may be fixed, or the cost may depend on the number of users that click on an advertising link returned in response to a search of the keyword. The amount of money a business spends on online advertising is referred to in the art as “ad-spend”, and the general goal of businesses advertising on the Internet is to minimize ad-spend and maximize not necessarily traffic through their website, but revenue generated from that traffic.
It is not uncommon for businesses keen on online advertising to purchase hundreds or thousands of keywords from one or more search engines. Typically, the management of such large numbers of keywords is performed manually with human users actually inputting the keywords. For example, keywords are currently managed using any one of a number of spreadsheet (e.g., Excel® by Microsoft Corporation) or document formats (e.g., Word® by Microsoft Corporation). Users generally list the keywords in a spreadsheet or document and then convert the document such that the keywords are listed in a format that is convertible and uploadable to a search engine. As indicated above, large advertising campaigns can have tens of thousands of keywords as part of an Internet marketing strategy. Therefore, those skilled in the art will note that such manual management of keywords can be cumbersome and prone to error.
Due to the demand and competition for various keywords, businesses often have to bid for keywords. Search engines generally provide rudimentary instructions for bidding on keywords. There are also a small number of predefined bidding strategies. Such strategies have been encoded by some bid management systems to, for example, maintain a position with regard to a keyword, maintain relative pricing as to a competitor or uniform resource locator (URL), and set bidding by time. However, as there are very few predefined bidding strategies, with so many different types of businesses, many bidding strategies may not be applicable to a large number of businesses.
Further, as described above, many businesses manage thousands or tens of thousands of keywords. Each may be associated with a single advertising campaign or multiple advertising campaigns. With such a great number of keywords, it is difficult to fit all of them with one of a very limited number of bidding strategies. Thus, there is at least a need for a system that provides flexibility so that a user or business entity is able to custom design bidding rules or strategies according to their needs and objectives.